A Shelf of Recent Books

BURTON RASCOE

IN Daedalus, J. B. S. Haldane, the English bio-chemist, looks into the future and sees the most startling and interesting sort of things, so fantastic some of them that I am minded to wait around for them. But then Bertrand Russell comes along in Icarus, accepts Haldane's predictions, pulls a sour face, and tells me, in effect, that if I live until these predictions come true I will jolly well wish I hadn't. These two views of the future of science and of science and the future are issued by Dutton in neat little books which can be read in less than an hour. For the layman I know of no more readable books showing how the scientific imagination is working and what direction the thought of the scientific philosophers is taking. Haldane predicts that the population of the world will be completely urbanized by the disappearance of agriculture and the appearance of synthetic foods manufactured on a large scale. He sees these cities of the future illuminated as bright as noonday and kept warm by huge metallic windmills working motors which will generate electricity. He sees sugar as cheap as saw-dust. And he sees what he calls ectoplasmic babies, produced by the artificial fecundation of a female ovum, so that the population of the state may be increased or diminished according to the state's will. None of his predictions, he says, is more daring than H. G. Wells' prediction in 1909 that heavier than air machines would be invented which would be capable of being used in war. Russell, admitting the almost unlimited possibilities of scientific invention, argues that the increase of these inventions serves more and more to enslave the human spirit and to permit liberty only to those who control the sources of economic power. From his former belief in the unmitigated evil of international finance, however, he has turned to international finance as offering the only hope for solution of the problem of war. If the world's resources could get into the control of one group, say of the United States, he believes that this will lead, through a period of cruelty and despotism, to a liberal international government. Haldane's book is a mental cocktail. Russell's is a sedative. They are probably the books of the month which will arouse the most discussion.

MRS. John King Van Rensselaer's The Social Ladder (Holt) is a lively and apparently an authoritative history of New York Society since the time of its organization by the wives of the Dutch settlers of Nieuw Amsterdam to the present day. It is replete with anecdotes, arrogant enough to be piquantly amusing, and it spares not the feelings of those who have come into social prominence since the early days when a president of the United States could be repeatedly snubbed by New York Society for having jilted a daughter of one of the patrician families. Mrs. Van Rensselaer is perhaps a little too assiduous in pushing the claims of the old Dutch families of New York to true aristocracy against the New Englanders, the Virginians, South Carolinians and the Marylanders; she even asserts that the Dutch patroons who settled on the toe of Manhattan were of a more cultured and aristo-' cratic stock than the members of the English royal house and peerage of that time. But, no less, her book is a valuable contribution to the study of American social history. She considers the careers of various social climbers and explains with some disdainful merriment the ordeal the social aspirant must endure before he is accepted even by a society which, she says, is no longer dignified, distinctive or exclusive—a Society which has been corrupted by money and made heterogeneous by the decay of patrician standards.

IF the delectable Clem Hawley in Don Marquis' The Old Soak's History of the World (Doubleday, Page) has gone a little wrong on his dates and facts, he has not gone wrong on the history of the human heart, which, as he figures, has remained about the same since the very earliest times. There is sweet wisdom and mellow fun in this book. The satire is not atrabilious but sane and reasonable and touched with irony. Prohibition and reform movements come in for some persistent kidding, as well as other concerns of the day, but Don Marquis' chief concern is the sympathetic delineation of the amusing vagaries of human nature, no less in his spokesman Clem than in the other figures in his gallery of characters. The Old Soak's motto is "Never go too far with it." He makes all of his historical accounts fit that wise counsel of moderation in everything, but in making facts fit the theory he is but following the precedent of almost every historian.

THE GOLDEN LADDER (Harper) by Rupert Hughes is a novel based upon the career of the famous beauty, Betty Jumel, over whom a legend has it that Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr fought their duel, although Mr. Hughes does not incorporate the legend in his story. As a girl Mme. Jumel had been brought up in vicious surroundings in Providence. She ran away from home at nineteen and became the mistress of Captain Delacroix whom she met on the boat to New York. She lived under several names and finally tricked Stephen Jumel, a rich man many years her senior with whom she had been living, into marrying her shortly before his death. She inherited the Jumel mansion in which she lived until her death at an advanced age. When she was sixty, she married Aaron Burr, who was nearly eighty, and who had repeatedly pressed her to marry him; but their marriage lasted only a short time: Mme. Jumel divorced him. The Golden Ladder is more of a historical narrative than a novel and as such it is a well documented and very interesting account of New York life in the early days of the American republic.